Paradox of The Human Condition

Nietzsche reportedly said that Dostoevsky was

“the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn.”

Dostoevsky understood something many therapies still grapple with:

People don’t simply pursue happiness.

Sometimes they pursue punishment.

Sometimes they protect pain.

Sometimes they destroy what they most want.

He saw contradiction as central to being human.

We talk so much around needing to be clear, to pick a lane, to decide how we feel. But perhaps the paradox of the human journey is that we can hold seemingly opposing truths at the same time.

If I feel love, how can I also feel hate?

If I am angry with you, why do I still desire you?

If I can forgive you, why do I still carry hurt?

How can I love my parents and know that they failed me?

Can I be grateful for my life and, at times, feel utterly lost inside it?

One feeling doesn’t necessarily make the other untrue.

Perhaps the work isn’t always to resolve these contradictions, but to learn to hold them.

A meaningful life doesn’t require us to resolve all our contradictions. Maybe it requires us to become spacious enough to allow them.

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

Time and time again, I go back to Man’s Search for Meaning and the question at the heart of it:

What gives your life meaning?

What gives you purpose?

What are the small, ordinary pockets of joy that remind you there is still something here for you?

Find those.

A conversation.

Making something.

Being needed.

Beauty.

Sex.

Nature.

Helping someone.

A cup of tea in the sun.

Not because they cancel the grief, anger, loneliness or uncertainty, but because they can exist alongside them.

Meaning isn’t what we find once we’ve resolved all the contradictions of being human.

What happens if we stop making emotional consistency the goal, what becomes the organising principle?

Maybe Frankl becomes some kind of answer to the question Dostoevsky left us with?

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